CENTRAL MOMENTS OF THE FREE ENERGY OF THE STATIONARY O'CONNELL-YOR POLYMER

Seppalainen and Valko showed in (ALEA Lat. Am. J. Probab. Math. Stat. 7 (2010) 451-476) that for a suitable choice of parameters, the variance growth of the free energy of the stationary O'Connell-Yor polymer is governed by the exponent 2/3, characteristic of models in the KPZ universality class. We develop exact formulas based on Gaussian integration by parts to relate the cumulants of the free energy, log Z(n,t)(theta), to expectations of products of quenched cumulants of the time of the first jump from the boundary into the system, s(0). We then use these formulas to obtain estimates for the kth central moment of log Z(n,t)(theta) as well as the kth annealed moment of s(0) for k > 2, with nearly optimal exponents (1/3) k + epsilon and (2/3) k + epsilon, respectively. As an application, we derive new high probability bounds for the distance between the polymer path and a straight line connecting the origin to the endpoint of the path.